Chuck E. Cheese's

Maybe some of you have similar stories about places like Chuck E. Cheese's that have shaped your gaming life.

Chuck E. Cheese's affected me a great deal when it opened up in my area in 1983. Not that I remember the year but this location was mentioned in David Sheff's Game Over, so that's how I know it was 1983.

This was still very much the era of the arcade but being a kid, I often didn't have as much access to arcade gaming as much as I would have liked. Arcades were scary places with evil teen-agers with Ratt T-shirts and brass knuckles. What I needed was an arcade for kids.

Chuck E. Cheese's was a dream come true. Screw the animatronics, this was arcade heaven. At the time I didn't know my Chuck E. Cheese's was owned by Nintendo and also housed Nintendo of Canada's offices. This arcade had virtually every arcade game Nintendo had made. I became a huge Nintendo fan before the NES arrived. There were plenty of non-Nintendo arcade games as well.

I seriously need to thank Nolan Bushnell for inventing this idea.

Anyone else grow up with Chuck E. Cheese's?

I have many fond memories of playing arcade games at Chuck E. Cheese's. The one near me had a Bucky O'Hare machine that I spent hours on, and an X-Men machine that I loved.

I did, and let me tell you, I was all about that Rock-a-fire Explosion Band. (Remember, with that banjo-playing bear and the ape on keyboards)?

Many quarters I spent on Lady Bug, Space Ace, Sinistar and Jr. Pac Man. There was also a laserdisc F14 game I remember staring at. M.A.C.H. 1 or something like that?

But yeah, great memories. :)

EDIT- Sorry, this was Showbiz Pizza I was thinking of. Perhaps they are part of the same chain or were bought out.. several years ago, Showbiz did change names to Chuck E Cheese.

M.A.C.H. 3 is the name of it.

Not Chuck E Cheese, but Circus Pizza which is similar.
Good Times.

BTW recently I went to a Chuck E Cheese and the selection of games was poor.

nothing like drowning in a ball-pit for fond memories...

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Originally posted by Korian
BTW recently I went to a Chuck E Cheese and the selection of games was poor.

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It's getting worse. Since I'm not a kid anymore (well, technically speaking), I don't peek in very often, but at last inspection my local Chuck E Cheese had only one game of note--Sega GT.

I've only ever been to a Chuck E. Cheese's once, and that was 8 months ago for my baby brother-in-law's birthday.

Every time I asked my parents to take me, they said "NO!" :(

Hey:

Growing up in Albuquerque, there was a Chuck E. Cheese's three blocks from my house. Interestingly enough, the games they had there were the X-Men beat-'em-up and Space Ace. Seems there were standard CEC cabs.

The pizza was horrible, it was always crowded, and neither of said games are very good. Years after I went as a kid, Chuck E. Cheese's in Albuquerque became known as THE place to get a job if you were a total burnout with no hope. A fellow I knew worked there, and he ended up going to jail for driving the getaway car in a late-night Albertson's robbery that went wrong and ended with the shotgun slaying of a 53-year-old grandmother.

-Technosphile

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Originally posted by NeoZeedeater
evil teen-agers with Ratt T-shirts and brass knuckles

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That made me laugh. Ratt, what a dumb band. And were these kids playing arcade games while wearing the brass knuckles? Seems to me that would make things hard.

There were no Chuck E. Cheeses around here but like Korian I went to Circus Pizza (probably the same one) maybe 3 times a year because I did not live in the same town as it, but I for some reason I remember going there with a Summertime School program and just loving it. I watched a bunch of kids beat The Simpsons Arcade game. And yeah the Pizza sucked and was WAY to crowded.

My brother is the Tech Manager at a Chuck E. Cheese now and there are maybe 2 arcade games there. Everything else is Ticket games. He told me all they have is Rush 2049 and that Sega Jet Ski game. Wow, what a selection eh? Oh well, times a changin'

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Originally posted by Captain Vegetable
I've only ever been to a Chuck E. Cheese's once, and that was 8 months ago for my baby brother-in-law's birthday.

Every time I asked my parents to take me, they said "NO!" :(

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well you're old enough to go where you want, but you're too old to be there... :(

I didn't have a lot of places to go in my area, so it wasn't a big deal. The closest thing I had was a partial pizza-bar hangout with a few arcades which ended up switching owners (and chucking the machines out the window) for a few years before it changed back. Plus 2 other places that opened awhile but vanished as well. In the town that was further out, I know of this guy who was trying to get a place he could keep running his stuff in, but we had a town gov that was a MAJOR prick (I still want to beat his head in) and was doing plenty of things to dictate where he could set up. Mainly he was stiffed with a high building payment and was told he brought trouble in the area with the kids and small gangs (which was total BS btw). I guess he just got mad and decided to quit becuase it was more trouble then it was worth. oh well...

but he did have this kick-ass spawn painting on the wall (he made it himself, todd would be proud! :D )

I'm pretty sure Chuck E. Cheese's was where I played my first arcade game, at about six or seven years old. Vs. Castlevania is the earliest one I remember.

My Chucky Cheese used to be called Showbiz. And wow, fond memories indeed I had of it. The most memorable would either be Dragon's Lair, getting dared to sneak under the curtain into the robot's area (believe me, it was a really scary concept at the time), playing in the balls (hahaha, and funny enough they always smelled like piss, wonder why...), Simpson's arcade game, the pizza (which I actually love), and....


COTTON CANDY! I still, to this day, go there for the cotton candy. Well...and to see the scary robots.

There was a fantastic Chuck E. Cheese in central Phoenix around 1983 or so that put every other modern CEC and Showbiz to shame. The place was huge, or at least it seemed that way to me when I was a kid. There was a big gazebo in the center of the building filled with classic arcade games like Centipede, Millipede, Pac-Man, Naughty Boy, Moon Patrol, Donkey Kong 3...and many more (those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head). To the left was a room full of redemption machines plus some mini-cabinets, you know those special ones they made for toddlers? Beyond the gazebo room was a room filled with the latest laserdisc games like M.A.C.H. 3, Firefox, Cobra Command and Cliff Hanger (actually a hacked-up "interactive" Lupin cartoon).

To the right was a giant mound of Swiss cheese that you could crawl through. And beyond it was the auditorium, a grand affair with a real stage and a big red curtain that parted to reveal the Rock-a-Fire Band. It was lame, but still cool to watch while downing a pizza slice or two.

And then there was the piece de resistance: a giant driving game with an enormous projection screen. The steering wheel controlled a car attached to a cylinder just in front of the projector that would make the car appear large when projected against the screen. It was a really poor game but still very impressive looking, if only for a few minutes.

Good times.

I enjoyed ball pits. As a kid, my dream was to have an extra-deep one built into my basement. I often wondered if it would be possible to drown in such a massive pile of balls. <-- (out of context quote bait)

However, by far my best and strangest memory of the local Chuck E. Cheese involved a playhouse called the Cheese Factory. It looked like a miniature house built into a wall, and behind the glass windows you could see wedges of "cheese" whisking by on conveyor belts. The front door was kid-sized, and I have so many weird, conflicting memories of its bizarre interior. I remember...

- the front room being bright yellow, and having funhouse-like mirrors. there was a mousehole in the corner you could crawl into, and something of interest was presumably in there. another mirror?

- you proceed by jumping into a round hole in the far corner that has round, carpeted steps downward. i seem to remember finding an underground-feeling room with a bunch of kids watching a tv in the corner. surreal.

- it gets blurrier after this. i think you might climb more round step things to get out of the tv room, and this might be near the end of the cheese factory experience. you crawl thorugh some tight tunnels and finally find a slide that takes you back out to the front, to your waiting parent(s).

- i have a semi-traumatic memory of being in that upper level tunnel part and then trying to go back through a door i'd passed through. however, it was one-way, and the only way out was down the slide. and... there's something about my mom having to rescue me from there. or maybe she just coaxed me down the slide.

Dream, reality... Who knows? Whatever happened, and whatever actually existed, I will never forget the Cheese Factory.

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Originally posted by sleeveboy
Cliff Hanger (actually a hacked-up "interactive" Lupin cartoon).

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Awful stuff, though my friend does have a cabinet of this. I never got very far in it but I remember the "JUMP! woooop JUMP! woooop JUMP!" and the "Billions! Trillions! They're all counterfeit!"

It's also in The Goonies for a split-second.

Heh, there was a Lupin III game at CGE that must have been the same. As far as FMV games go it was pretty unplayable. Talk about unintuitive.

It's a shame that Chuck E. Cheese lately has been a joke. Now they've got very few games... when I saw maybe 4-6 video games and too many redemption games to count, I was mortified. "What have they done to this place!?!?" was the first thing to cross my mind.

They do own a place called TJ Hartford's www.tjhartfords.com , but there is only one location... and it is in Texas. It sounds like a Dave & Buster's type place except with quarters (none of that expensive debit card crap).

By the way, www.showbizpizza.com now is a very good fan site dedicated to Showbiz & Chuck E. Cheese. From here, I found a link to a site which had info on the token formerly used by TJ Hartfords... and learned about the existence of TJH in the first place. I'm hoping CEC opens a TJH around my town sometime.

http://users.pullman.com/fjstevens/tokens/cec/CEC.html
Scroll all the way to the bottom and check out the TJ Hartford's token link.

I remember hating Chuck E. Cheese's when I was a kid. The food sucked, the other kids were annoying, I was too big to go in the ball pit or climb through the funhouse, and all the games at the one near me were lame.

There was a rollerskating place down the street, however, that kicked ass. Decent food, fun games (The Simpsons being my favorite0, and watching the huge pileups of people who couldn't skate made it the cool place to be. It also helped that I was hell on wheels (on the skates, that is).

I like their pizza.

But it's expensive.

Chuck E Cheese's was paradise when I was a kid. Least a dozen arcade cabs, skeeball to earn cheesy prizes, and the pizza was actually pretty good. I even enjoyed the lame robot show back then. Good times.

When I was a kid in Hollywood FL, we didn't have a Chuck E. Cheese but we had a place called Circus Playhouse. It was basically the exact same thing. They had redemption games, a shitload of arcade games, the robots, and awesome pizza. I used to live about a 10 minute walk from it and practically lived there.

It's where I mastered Super Mario Bros. :)

I have fond memories of Chuck E. Cheese. I remember the incredibly long line to play this new video game called Dragon's Lair. People were even paying 50 cents a pop (!) to play it. The graphics were phenomenal, though. I'd squeeze through the crowd to watch the game. Those were the days....

I always thought their pizza was pretty bad. Good entertainment, bad pizza. Of course, when you are a kid, even bad pizza is good.

Here's an interesting one for you. My first memory of a Showbiz Pizza Place was in, get this, Guadalajara frickin Mexico. This was around '84-'88. The only game that I can really remember was this side scrolling shooter where your character could turn into a jet or turn back to a walker robot. Kinda like a robotech or something. It's all kinda vague because I was only about 5 or 7 years old at the time. Still, I loved the place.

Is this that game, Gecco?

Jaleco's Formation Z

http://sakyouzi.hp.infoseek.co.jp/formation-z.jpg

I only went to Chuck E Cheese's a few times as a kid, and even though I enjoyed going, the place was pretty shitty. The best game they had was Captain America and the Avengers, everthing was crap, and their Pizza tasted funny. I've also heard that they've recently removed that bacteria cess pool, the ball pit from their establishment.

God damn it man, I think that's it!! I havent's seen that game for close to 18 years now. Jesus, thanks.

wow, formation Z. I used to play that all the time on my NES. surprising to see anyways. . .


Chuck E. Cheese. . .my post is like Ammadeau's, but I liked to get away from the pizza and presents as soon as possible(it was the birthday spot). . . when I was really young I remember playing pole position often. Around the time I stopped going there, I think the game of choice was ninja turtles.

My game there was the original Tron arcade game... at least that's the only one I actually remember. I avoided the ball pit and such for being too 'kiddie' even though I was still very much a kid at the time.

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Originally posted by Sqoon
Awful stuff, though my friend does have a cabinet of this. I never got very far in it but I remember the "JUMP! woooop JUMP! woooop JUMP!" and the "Billions! Trillions! They're all counterfeit!"

It's also in The Goonies for a split-second.

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Holy shit. I would kill a half dozen people with my bare hands to own that cabinet.

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Originally posted by BenT
Heh, there was a Lupin III game at CGE that must have been the same. As far as FMV games go it was pretty unplayable. Talk about unintuitive.

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That game was the highlight of my trip. I played for 20 minutes straight without dying, and got the high score both days. I was even on G4 TV for all of 12 seconds playing it. Beautiful chrome T-Molding.:D


I have poor parents. They borrow from me. Showbiz Pizza as it was called in the midwest was an option for me only when I was invited to a birthday party, or when I spent the night at the house of kid with really generous parents.